Is Polygamy on the Right Side of History?

By Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review    — July 1, 2015

It should by now be abundantly clear that the laziest cases against the inevitability of polygamy are starting to push up the daisies. Before Justice Kennedy decided to appoint himself the nation’s most cherished arbiter of dark magic and inscrutable liberty, it was sufficient for the champions of matrimonial transformation to wave their hands and to cast their inquisitors as madmen. “Nobody is talking about multiple marriage,” they would scoff. “And even if they were, the people wouldn’t stand for it.” Today, in the first week of the Age of Substantive Due Process, neither of these rejoinders will fly. It is not just that we are now moving with such speed that what “nobody is talking about” yesterday becomes our deafening conversation by the next — although, increasingly, we are — it is that what the majority wants has been set aside. Had the Supreme Court elected to find a narrow right to gay marriage within the Constitution’s text, the “polygamy couldn’t happen brigade” might have a leg to stand on. It didn’t. They don’t.

It is for this reason, I suspect, that supporters of the ruling have this week intuited the need for a more robust set of rebuttals. One such, featured yesterday in Politico Magazine, struck an uncommonly exasperated note. Although “the polygamy argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny,” Jonathan Rauch griped, “that doesn’t stop it from popping up everywhere.” Rauch concedes openly that he has been irritated by the likes of Justice Roberts, Fredrik deBoer, and Carmen Fowler LaBerge — all of whom have reacted to the ruling by indulging in a “non sequitur.” “No,” he writes impatiently, “polygamy isn’t the next gay marriage.” Shut up, already!

Source: www.nationalreview.com